School Wide Stop Motion Animation

I was completely inspired last spring by seeing Mr. Haske amazing, Keith Haring inspired stop motion animation.  See the video below. I tweeted about it right away and knew I would do a project like this in my classroom for the first week of school.  And so I did. 

The inspiration was our theme of the school year.  We (Hassan Elementary) is turning 10 years old this year.  We are having a year long birthday party.  AWESOME.  Our Husky mascot, Pride joined us on the first day of school as we all sang happy birthday.  As most art teachers know, we don't have one first day, we have several.  I'm on a 6 day rotation this year so I met 5 new classes every day, for 6 days.  I stuck with the same lesson for all classes.  My goals were as follows...

• I wanted the students to learn the location of tools and the design of the room.
• I wanted students to feel safe with the lesson they were going to complete on day one.
• I am a new teacher to the school so I wanted to take the time and get to know my students as they were working on a simple coloring sheet.
• I wanted to make a large group collaboration for the students of Hassan.
• I wanted to celebrate our theme. 

This project met all of my goals.  Heres how I did it.  I created about 200 hand drawn, line drawings to fulfill the goals of my story line.  Then I got smart and used line drawings and the copy machine for the rest of the 550 images.  It was a TON of work, but I had a vision and I'm so happy with the final result.  Each page was numbered so when kids were done, I organized and took pictures on the Stop Motion App on my iPad.  I did this after every class for the 6 days.

This was my set up, taped to stay in place for the week

You can see I used braces to keep the pages in the same position.

Lot's of paper, but the project was worth it. 

So, here it is, the final project... I hope you enjoy it!

Parents and teachers were all given the link of this video and it has about 800 hits in two days.  That really says something.  Hassan parents and kids are interested and excited about art and our project.  I have lots of great comments and emails to show how much they care.  It was all worth the work.